GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea.

If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude. As in his illustrations for Matt de la Peña’s Last Stop on Market Street (2015), the artist’s characters and environments have a realness to them, perhaps because Robinson portrays them with such respect, love, and ease.Ī story about the importance of ritual and the ability for renewal, itself magnificently renewed by Robinson. While simply rendered, with basic shapes and few brush strokes, the design of the spreads and the progression of images are spatially sophisticated. And his characters are diverse in gender and ethnicity but universal in their emotions, curiosity, and playfulness (one wears fairy wings and another a fox costume). His setting is a lush urban park filled with trees, bridges, and ponds, framed by a city skyline. Robinson stays true to the intent of the original text and illustrations but elegantly improves upon it with cinematic storytelling. Both innocent and wise, the children sing about the bird’s death and cry before inscribing a stone to place on top.

Knowing it will never fly again, they create a grave-wrapping the bird in grapevine leaves and burying it with sweet-ferns and flowers. The children find a still-warm bird and experience its loss. Robinson reimagines the 1958 story originally illustrated by Remy Charlip, in which children find a dead bird and offer it a send-off through ritual and song.īrown’s lovely, gentle, and reassuring text remains the same.

The dead bird by margaret wise brown